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There were bonds — certainly, in the Swedish films. Not only with earth, but with country ; the country one lived in, as well as on, and was part of. Bonds with family, friend, feeling, and the fate that was made up of these. To the land and so to the law of the land. Bound to one thing, one was bound to all that went with it. The pleasures and preoccupations recklessly accepted by un-Nordic cultures in Swedish films became or brought with them, bonds. There was, in a sense, no freedom. In another sense, there was the only freedom. In both, the films had a certain responsibility.
There was no blind grasping for good times, undeserved and undurable, as in Californian cinema. No indulgence or individualism as in that of Germany or France ; and Russia had not yet occurred. The people of Swedish films were representative ; representative of whatever spark of original virtue was in them. They were impelled to give it a good show, to live up to the life they were in and to live up to themselves as that life directed. To do one at the expense of the other meant defiance, therefore waste and frustration, hence tragedy. It was all quite simple. As simple as life — if one, if others rather, had courage to live it. In Swedish films, people had. They embraced their destiny, and embraces are bonds, the worst there are. Those implacable mothers, faithful brothers and almost invariably outcast sons and daughters did what they did because they were bound to. Reasoned consideration of circumstance, intuitively reasoned acceptance of feeling led them to. It became their duty, accepted because analysed. When they failed, they failed through a flaw in their reasoning. Thus and thus only they became cowards or villains. When they loved, they loved with fierce fanatical fervour, and they took pain, not self-sadisticallv, but as a bond with something further. They wanted to be bound to as much of life as they could. There was no running away, no sex-shilly or spiritual shally. Ironically, these grim, heavy, cloud-shot tragedies were instinct with passion for life. The death-impulse lay in pictures by Chaplin, Pickford, Daniels, Colleen Moore, the get-rich-quickies, which killed them.
Then a new Swedish' film comes and one remembers all this. iNIolander, who made En Natt is not, never was, cannot be, a first-rate director, but his film had enough to make us remember all these things which only the Swedish cinema gave. The things which made one accept it, despite its strict retribution, its old-fashioned moral scales, its denial and sacrifice. En Natt begins with water-wheels turning, with pale Northern light on stable doors, a stream over rocks, and a voice singing. At once we remember ... we are back in a world where a voice singing is insolubly linked with the grain in wood, with the way a fern grows, and the flap of a curtain in a rough mill window. We remember that some films, sometimes, give us our own world on the screen. Then the story begins. The implacable mother — Gerda Lundequist, of Gosta, herself — bourgeois, and hideously, but so rightly, dressed. She finds one of her two sons to be in love with a mill-girl. Disinheritance, at once! Though Uno Henning,